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Diana Athill… on two types of readers

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I couldn’t find an apt place to include this quotation in my review of Diana Athill’s Stet yesterday, but it’s so wonderful a quotation that I had to put it up somewhere:

People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two
kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they
can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment
among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on
reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The
second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the
best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is
really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches,
because it has become more and more resistant to courting.
How simply this clears up my confusion over ‘Why did that become a bestseller?’ – or even the concept of the bestseller at all.  The second group, as she details later in Stet, would just as happily turn to music or television or cinema for their entertainment.  Those of us in the first group (though of course we might well enjoy music, television, and cinema) cannot imagine a substitute for books.  Nothing comes close.

year seven: book reviews

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Athill, Diana – Stet 
Athill, Diana – Somewhere Towards the End 
Athill, Diana – Midsummer Night at the Workhouse
Ayckbourn, Alan – The Crafty Art of Playmaking
Ayckbourn, Alan – Relatively Speaking  
Bawden, Nina – A Woman of My Age
Beauman, Ned – The Teleportation Accident 
Benson, Stella – I Pose 
Birchall, Diana – The Compleat Mrs. Elton 
Bonnet, Jacques – Phantoms on the Bookshelf
Brosh, Allie – Hyperbole and a Half
Christie, Agatha – DumbWitness  
Christie, Agatha – Five Little Pigs 
Constanduros, Denis – My Grandfather and Father, Dear Father
Delafield, E.M. – The Suburban Young Man 
Douglas, O. – Pink Sugar
Elinger, John & Kathy Shock – That Sweet City: Visions of Oxford  
Essex, Mary – Six Fools and a Fairy  
Faulks, Sebastian – Faulks on Fiction 
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Fraser, Ronald – The Flying Draper  
Fraser-Sampson, Guy – Lucia on Holiday  
Gallico, Paul – The Foolish Immortals
Gibbons, Stella – Bassett  
Gibbons, Stella – Here Be Dragons 
Graham, Virginia – Consider The Years  
Green, John – The Fault in Our Stars   
Greene, Graham – The End of the Affair 
Haddon, Mark – The Red House  
Hill, Susan – Black Sheep
Hillyer, Richard – Country Boy 
Holtby, Winifred – Virginia Woolf 
Ivey, Eowyn – The Snow Child 
Jenkins, Michael – A House in Flanders 
Keane, Molly – Young Entry  
Kennedy, A.L. – On Writing 
Kennedy, Margaret – Together and Apart
Kosztolányi, Dezső – Skylark 
Leighton, Clare – Four Hedges 
Logan, John – Peter and Alice 
MacDonald, Betty – The Egg and I  
Maclaren-Ross, Julian – Of Love and Hunger 
Manguel, Alberto – The Library at Night  
Manguel, Alberto – A Reader on Reading
Marquis, Don – The Best of Archy and Mehitabel
Maxtone Graham, Ysenda – Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School 
Maxwell, Gavin – Ring of Bright Water  
Maxwell, William – Time Will Darken It
Mercer, Jeremy – Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs 
Mills, Magnus – The Restraint of Beasts 
Murnighan, Jack – Beowulf on the Beach  
Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita 
Olivier, Edith – The Underground River
Pym, Barbara – Some Tame Gazelle 
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front  
Rice, Eva – The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp
Robertson, E. Arnot – Cullum
Sedaris, David – Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim 
Spark, Muriel – Symposium  
Sprigge, Elizabeth – The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 
Stern, G.B. – Ten Days of Christmas
Stockett, Kathryn – The Help 
Thomas, Edward – Oxford 
Townsend, Sue – The Queen and I  
Trillin, Calvin – Floater
von Arnim, Elizabeth – Mr. Skeffington  
Waugh, Evelyn – Scoop 
West, Elizabeth – Hovel in the Hills
Wilson, Ethel – Hetty Dorval
Woolf, Virginia – Jacob’s Room

Stet – Diana Athill (and a giveaway)

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42. Stet – Diana Athill

I’ve been savouring the all-too-few pages of Stet (2000) by Diana Athill, and now it’s going into my 50 Books You Must Read – and it was so good that I had to go and buy another copy to offer as a giveaway (to anywhere in the world.) Just pop your name in the comments, along with the author you most wish you’d been able to edit. (You can interpret that in a positive way – how wonderful to get to see their drafts! – or a negative way – my GOODNESS they needed editing!)  I’ll do the draw next weekend on 20th April.

Right, now I’ll write my review and tell you why I think you should enter to win! I bought Stet a year ago, adding it to my little pile of unread Diana Athill memoirs, knowing that at some point I would read it and love it.  What’s not to like about a memoir by one of the most famous editors in the world?  I was saving it as a treat, when I saw that various bloggers were posting reviews, since the Slaves of Golconda were reading it (there’s a sampling of those reviews at the end of mine.)  What better excuse to dig out my copy, and indulge?

Although Diana Athill now seems famously chiefly for being old (she is 95), she is also recognised as one of the country’s best editors, having worked as one for five decades under the auspices of André Deutsch.  Her reason for writing Stet also explains it’s title, so I’ll hand over to Athill to explain:

Why am I going to write it?  Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in my squeaks “Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!!”.  It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that.  By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin.  This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form.
This explanation, though both moving and understandable, is also an example of the extraordinary modesty which Athill demonstrates.  Not a false modesty, or even a polite modesty, but a genuine refusal to believe how brilliant she is.  She occasionally quotes people’s praise of her – which is not (in this instance) the action of the immodest, but the grateful incredulity of the humble.

Stet is divided into two sections.  The second, which I will come onto, looks in detail at her relationships with various authors whom she edited.  The first deals with her career in publishing in a fairly fast-paced manner (she covers 50 years in 128 pages – that’s a few months per page, folks) and has a great deal of common sense to say about the practice of editing, as well as lovely gossip about what a controlling – though somehow lovable – monster André Deutsch was, and various illuminating revelations about how scattergun their policy for accepting submissions was in the early days.  Basically, everything they liked was accepted – from cookbooks to travel books to experimental short stories to children’s books.  Quite how they described their list, I can’t imagine.

Anybody interested in the process of how a book goes (or went) from a manuscript clutched in an author’s hand to a copy on Foyles’ shelves will inevitably find Stet interesting, but what carries it from being an interesting discussion of ‘an editor’s life’ (the subtitle) is Athill’s wisdom, warmth, and wit.  As an example of the latter, here’s her brief account of working with an author on a book about Tahiti which was interesting but appallingly written:

I doubt if there was a sentence – certainly there was not a paragraph – that I did not alter and often have to retype, sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval which – although he was naturally grouchy – he always gave.  I enjoyed the work.  It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained (a good deal more satisfying than the minor tinkering involved when editing a competent writer).  Soon after the book’s publication it was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement: an excellent book, said the reviewer, scholarly and full of fascinating detail, and beautifully written into the bargain.  The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note.  “How nice of him,” I thought, “he’s going to say thank you!”  What he said in fact was: “You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what i have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary.”  When I had stopped laughing I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus).  We must always remember that we are only midwives – if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.
(Which, of course, is what Athill has done.)  Although Athill admits that editing the competent writer is a less interesting activity, what I admire about her editorial eye is the willingness, often expressed in Stet, to do minimal work.  It takes a humble and wise editor to resist using her own taste as a benchmark, and looking, instead, for ways in which the author can express theirs.

The first half of Stet is filled with lively and observant accounts of her colleagues and friends, and is certainly very far from dry – but the second half is more overtly about the characters she met.  I shan’t go into depth about this section; I’ll just let you know the people to whom chapters are devoted: Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, V.S. Naipaul, Molly Keane, Alfred Chester.  I’ve only read two books by all these authors combined, but I still found her portraits touching, intelligent, and (above all) observant.  The length of these sections, and the accounts she gives of these authors’ personal and professional lives, are perfectly judged.

Hopefully that is enough to tempt you to read Stet.  I’ve barely covered the second half of it, but that means there is even more to discover for yourself!  So… if you have been tempted, pop your name in the comments, and that author whom you wish you’d edited. Stat!


Others who got Stuck in this Book:


“Athill is that very rare thing, a shrewdly selfish spectator. She’s quite unlike anyone I’ve met before, either in person or on the page.” – Alex in Leeds


“I have this feeling that if you are lucky enough to be seated next to Athill at a dinner party, it would be an evening filled with sparkling conversation.  Reading Stet is (almost) the next best thing.” – Danielle, A Work in Progress


“Athill has the gift of cutting through the complicated tangle to the simple heart of the issues that publishers face.” – Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room

Song for a Sunday

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First things first, I’ve been back and replied to comments from the past week or so – sorry it’s taken me a while!

Secondly – the Sunday Song.  I actually used to live in the same village as this artist, and I think we were in the local youth group at the same time – but I only discovered yesterday that she writes and sings really good folk songs.  Have a listen to Fade Away by Mae Bradbury:

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, everyone! I’m feeling in a good mood as I write this on Friday night, because I went back to the first chapter of my DPhil thesis for the first time in 3 years, and I still felt inspired to see how I could edit and re-frame it!  It’s been so long since I had time to work on my DPhil properly that I’d forgotten the thrill when planning goes right.  The only academic thing to compare is the thrill when archives turn up something wonderful.  There are plenty of downsides to spending four years earning very little money and working alongside very few people, but it has its upsides too.

So that’s put me in a cheery frame of mind for sharing a book, a link, and a blog post!

1.) The book – is one I was offered by the author.  I know I won’t have time to read it, so I haven’t accepted the review copy, but I still think it sounds very intriguing. It’s A Bright Moon For Fools by Jasper Gibson, and the cover art is enough to catch my attention…

I like the quick synopsis Jasper put in an email to me: “Though it is (I hope) funny in parts, it’s really about an ageing man, unable to get over the loss of his wife, crashing around rural Venezuela and getting into serious trouble.”

2.) The blog post – was a very easy choice this week, as it’s about a book I adored, but never wrote about: Economy Must Be Our Watchword by Joyce Dennys.  I didn’t write about it, because it was impossible to find and I didn’t want to fill people with hopeless desire to read this gem!  But I mentioned it when I took part in Lost in the Stacks over at A Work in Progress, and Danielle, marvellously, managed to find a copy through her library – and wrote a brilliant review here.  Go and check it out; it also includes lots of Dennys’s brilliant illustrations.

3.) The link – this video had my office in fits of laughter this week:

Interview with a new blogger (and happy birthday me)

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On 10th April 2007, Stuck-in-a-Book was launched… I don’t know whether or not I thought I’d still be blogging six years later, I hadn’t really thought about it, but I certainly hadn’t imagined that I’d meet so many wonderful people (online and offline) or have such fun.  Thank you for making my first six years so lovely!

I’ve done a few retrospectives, or thanking posts, at various anniversaries – so I’ll do something a bit different today.  It seems appropriate, on a blog birthday of a longstanding blog (six years feels very longstanding in the blogosphere!) to welcome the recent arrival of another beautiful baby blog.  Also, although this is far from a unique-to-me quality, I hope that one of the dominant characteristics of Stuck-in-a-Book is an encouragement of community, and a celebration of other bloggers.  With that in mind, I have interviewed a new blogger – Washington Wife.

Washington Wife is one of my very dearest friends, and I’m thrilled that she has entered the blogging world.   Hers is not a book blog, but she loves books about as much as I do, so I’d be surprised if they don’t make an appearance now and then.  Her reasons for starting blogging are below, so I shan’t explain them for her.  (And, because she is a journalist, she is keeping herself anonymous on her blog – I will have to work hard to remember not to include her real name, and shall refer to her as Washington Wife, or WW.  In the interview below, I am ST – you can decide for yourself whether it’s short for Stuck-in-a-Book or Simon Thomas.)  Oh, and do, of course, check out her blog and say hello – it’s really brilliant so far, and I’m not just saying that as a close friend!

ST: So, what made you decide to start blogging, huh? HUH?

WW: Well, at the beginning of February, my husband got a job in Washington D.C, and we’ve just (at the end of March) moved there from Paris, where we’ve both spent three years as journalists. I’m sure there are innumerable ‘new to the US’ and even ‘new to Washington’ blogs (there were certainly lots of ‘Brits abroad’ ones in France) but I thought mine would be an interesting viewpoint given I’m comparing the US not only to my native land, the UK, but also my adopted homeland for the last three years, France.

I think it was also a combination of my wanting to record how I felt about living in such a talked-about country, about which everyone has an opinion, and the fact that it was a lot easier than sending dozens of separate emails to all the people who would want to know said thoughts. I was a bit scared to start though because I’m not always very good at seeing projects through… but I’m really enjoying it so far!

ST: What are your first impressions of living in America?

WW: Well – you’ll have to look at my blog ;) Mainly though, everyone really is helpful and friendly (compared to Paris, where I was living before!) and everything is bigger. The roads are wider, the buildings are taller, the portions are larger, the billboards are higher, the packets in the supermarket are heavier… Paris, and even London, will feel miniature in comparison!

ST: Anything super-amazing-exciting happened to you yet?  Just a question out of the BLUE, not something I know about already, obvs.

WW: Well it’s funny you should mention… but (again, see my blog for full account!) on Easter Sunday, my husband and I decided to try a little church not too far from our new flat in downtown D.C. The church is opposite the White House and the website said it has a pew reserved for the President. We thought that was rather sweet…but we arrived to find the whole building sealed off, secret service everywhere and the First Family on the way there! Amazingly, we managed to get in for the service, and, sitting in the gallery, had a wonderful view of Barack Obama, Michelle and the two girls. We even got within a foot of them when we went up to communion. Not bad for our first week in D.C!

ST: Do you have any thoughts about the direction in which you’d like your blog to go?

WW: Well, as I said, I was a bit nervous about beginning as I’m rather feeling the pressure to continue, but I keep finding, as I wend my merry and very uncertain way around Washington, that new ideas and thoughts for blogging keep occurring to me. I think it’s made me a slightly better observer, so that’s a positive thing I’d like to continue. I think eventually it may have to stop being about my perspective as a ‘newcomer’ (I don’t know when you stop being one of those though – in English country villages, I think it takes about half a century) and be more about the city itself and – hopefully – the more unusual, off the beaten track things I’m discovering (if I do!) One thing I don’t want it to be about is work – it’s nice to do something separate from journalism!

ST: Could you pick one thing you miss about England, one thing you miss about France, and one thing you’re loving about America?

WW: Hmmm… one thing in each category is difficult! I think I most miss English understatement and sarcasm (I missed it in France too!), because here everyone is very sincere and a bit earnest and sometimes I just long for a little putdown or self-mockery.

I rather miss the Paris metro – it smelt of wee, but it was very efficient and there was a train every 3 minutes most of the time. The other day here I had to wait 10 minutes for a metro train, and it took a bus I was on over an HOUR to get from downtown to the National Cathedral, a distance of about four miles, because of the ridiculous amount of traffic and lack of public transport options.

But one thing I am really enjoying about America is how convenient everything is (apart from public transport!) Everything’s open all the time, the customer service people really do attempt to help you, the roads are easy to cross… everything is designed to make your life a little bit better. And that is refreshing.

ST: And, since Stuck-in-a-Book is a book blog, cards on the table: what are the best English novel, French novel, and American novel?

WW: Ooooh. Toughie. Best French and American novels are hard because I’m woefully under-read in those categories, and English because there are too many to choose from. I’d say that the novel that had me most gripped at a young age, and I always love re-reading, is Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Stylistically, it might not be Middlemarch, but the plot is superb and the narrator compelling.

Regarding French novels, can I cheat? It’s not really a novel, but when I was a child, my Godmother gave me one copy of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s book Le Petit Prince in French, and another in English. I loved the English version at the time, but, later on, was doubly delighted by its whimsy in French. But it’s definitely not just for children!

As for American novels, although I loved The Great Gatsby and Lolita, and Little Women will always remain one of my favourite children’s books (I especially remember my childish British puzzlement at some of the quaint American words and traditions!) I might have to pick one I know Simon hates… The Catcher in the Rye. It had a real effect on my writing style for a while after I read it – not necessarily for the better! – and Holden Caulfield continued to intrigue me long after I put the book down. But I also loved The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

ST: Now choose one English author, one French author, and one American author that you’re looking forward to trying out.

WW: Now this is easier! My ‘to be read’ list is huge.

In French, I always meant to try out Michel Houllebecq, in translation OR in the original… I just never got round to it. So I’d probably start with Les Particules Elémentaires (or Atomized, in English), which won several international awards.

As for American authors, there are so many! I have joined the local library here and browsing the shelves made me realise just how much I have to catch up on… For starters, I borrowed one Anne Tyler (Digging to America) and one Gore Vidal (appropriately enough, Washington, D.C  – I didn’t realise he’d written a series of historical novels.) But also keen to start reading more Philip Roth (only ever read Portnoy’s Complaint!) and Jonathan Franzen.

And an English author I don’t yet know… Well, my policy when trying to cut down the number of books for shipping over here was mainly to bring ones I hadn’t yet read. So there are plenty to choose from! Including A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton Burnett, an author much recommended by a certain friend who’s always StuckInABook. So I’m hoping to start enjoying that one soon. Another book I’m really excited about – and this is cheating a bit – is by an author I already know and deeply love, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Apparently, the fifth volume in her series The Cazalets is coming out in the autumn; I can’t wait!

ST: And the question I ask everyone – what are you reading at the moment?

WW: Well, slightly naughtily, given everything I wrote above, I’m reading an author who’s neither French, nor English, nor yet American, but Israeli. It’s a book I borrowed from the library near our new flat, called The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu, and it’s about three Israeli girls who are conscripted into the army, and how they get on. Given that for much of the time, they are very bored, the book itself is quite a page turner, and very strangely and beautifully written. It certainly gives you an insight into the lives of Israeli teenagers.

The photo, by the way, shows the ONLY books we currently have on our new living room bookshelf (The People of Forever Are Not Afraid being upstairs!) This state of affairs won’t last, once all our worldly goods arrive by ship from Paris via Bristol via New York City… I thought Simon would be pleased to note the stack of OUP Very Short Introductions as well… on offer in W.H Smith on the rue de Rivoli…

Innocent cat grabbed in garden

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Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will have seen these already, but I thought I’d share some pictures of me playing with Sherpa when I went home for Easter…  My hair, incidentally, is much shorter now.  I think Sherpy’s is the same length.  (Photos taken by my brother Colin.  I deleted the ones he took of his feet.)

Sherpa ‘runs into my arms’.
HUGS!
Revenge of the cat…

 

“I claim this land for cats!”
  
She’s looking a wee bit drunken in this pic…
but I reckon it’s just happiness :)
That’s certainly what’s lighting up my silly face!

I was going to write a film review tonight.  You got cat photos instead.  Who’s to say which is better?  (Spoiler alert: you’ll probably get the film review soon, too.)

Some recent books…

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I thought I’d do a little round-up of various books that I’ve bought and been given, because… well, why not?  You usually have something fun to say about them.

That Sweet City: Visions of Oxford – John Elinger and Katherine Shock
Kathy Shock is Our Vicar’s Wife’s dear friend from school days, and also lives in Oxford (my experience of Oxford for the first 18 years of my life was chiefly visiting Kathy and her family) – she is also a brilliant artist, and sent me a copy of That Sweet City.  It has poems by John Elinger and illustrations by Kathy (one of which you see in the photo above) – I’ll write more about it in due course.

Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
Continuing the Oxford them – so many people have told me that I must read this (and been rather outraged when they discover that I haven’t) that I’d better snap up this Penguin edition when I saw it.

The Teleportation Accident – Ned Beauman
I loved his first novel Boxer, Beetle (even though I didn’t expect to at all), so I was excited to receive the paperback edition of this Booker-longlisted second novel.  And isn’t it a fantastic cover? Thanks, Sceptre!

The Secrets of Bredon Hill – Fred Archer
I had to bring this home, when I saw it in a Headington charity shop, since it’s about the year 1900 in Aston-under-Hill – which is the village in Worcestershire where I went to Bredon Hill Middle School for three years.  Quite a curious coincidence to find this in Oxford…

The Crack in the Teacup – Joan Bodger
When I wrote about Bodger’s brilliant account of touring literary sites in England, How The Heather Looks, the blogger at Leaves and Pages (sorry, can’t find your real name, I feel bad about that) recommended that I try Bodger’s autobiography – and I immediately ordered a copy.

C.S. Lewis: A Life – Alister McGrath
When Sophie at Hodder offered me a copy of a new C.S. Lewis and mentioned that she’d found my review of Lewis’s beautiful book A Grief Observed, then I couldn’t say no, could I?  I’ve seen Shadowlands, but I’ve never actually read a biography or autobiography of Lewis, some I’m excited to get my teeth into this one.

Any comments on any of these very welcome!  What is the latest book you’ve bought?